Thursday, February 05, 2009

A Stimulus for the Ages

Our nation finds itself standing upon a truly frightening threshold, looking out upon an abyss of debt and deficit. This is the burden with which we have saddled our children. Through no fault of their own, they will be forced to labor under the heavy yoke of liberty-stifling taxation. Thanks to our fiscal indiscretion we may very well be the first generation to renege on that sacred American dream, that our children will have access to a better life than their forebears enjoyed.

It is not terribly difficult to see how we got here. The facts cut a clear path to a housing sector that was rife with corruption and rancid with greed. Homeowners who had visions of grandeur they could ill afford, met with creditors who foolhardily provided them the credit they wanted, regardless of their pecuniary fitness. Now we find ourselves afflicted with a financial cancer that has brought our economy to its knees. Our government, now entirely in the hands of Democrats, seeks to ignore the tumor and treat merely the symptoms, with a bill whose costs increase daily. The trillion dollar price tag associated with the current stimulus package is a dizzying sum; and like the stimulus and bailouts that preceded it, will prove to be a foolhardy lesson in futility, the costs of which we cannot begin to imagine.


We have arrived at a profound economic crossroads. The American people have borne the weight of job losses, cut wages, and reduced savings, by tightening their belts and revaluating their financial priorities. The government wants no part of that prudence however, and instead proposes to shower federal programs with money taken from the pockets of those same taxpayers. Throwing caution to the wind, Democrats are embarking on a path that will succeed only in shackling our children with a debt obligation that we can hardly fathom.


Inevitably, the day of reckoning will come. The buck will reach a point where it can no longer be passed, and the piper will seek to collect. Let us err on the side of restraint and good sense, because while our collective attention span is often brief, the reverberations of our actions will be felt for decades hence.